The Cannon Law—ARC(43)

"But you still think there is a risk to Our person?"



"Inevitably. Your Holiness would not be the first pope to be arrested or even assassinated."



Barberini coughed politely. "If I might suggest that there is no need to plan against one eventuality exclusively? Your Holiness has guards, after all."



"Indeed," said Urban, beaming at Barberini as at a bright schoolboy who had mastered a basic point. "Not all assassination plots are as feeble-witted as Camillo's."



"Indeed not," Barberini agreed. Camillo had tried to kill the pope with sympathetic magic, sticking pins into a doll. He had been tried and found guilty and thoroughly laughed at.



"There is more, however," Vitelleschi said. "The Committee of Correspondence has become active in Rome. Quevedo is using them."



Barberini had heard about that, and could not suppress a chuckle. "So that was Quevedo?" Barberini was, technically, an Inquisition cardinal these days, and so received reports. "That young revolutionary whom Your Holiness ordered me to marry off to his inamorata was most incensed about the false broadsides that have begun to circulate in Rome. He had to be escorted out of San Mateo, I understand. He demanded an investigation and the perpetrators be punished. It, ah, was what brought those broadsides to the Holy Office's attention in the first place. There is some confusion as a result."



"Ha." Vitelleschi laughed for the second time in that meeting. Barberini began to wonder if the old Jesuit was not becoming addled in his old age: the man appeared to be in danger of developing a sense of humor. "Indeed it was Quevedo," he went on. "The printer he went to is one of our informants."



"And the substance of the printing?" Urban asked.



"A pastiche of revolutionary propaganda, anticlerical and rabble-rousing. Of a piece with the mobs he has been organizing, to whom his agents have claimed to represent the Committee," Vitelleschi answered.



"Even if it was the Committee," Urban said, "I doubt We have anything to fear from that direction. I have met most of them, and they seem quite ineffectual."



Barberini could see where it was going, however. "I would predict, Your Holiness, that within a few days Borja's tame preachers will be viewing all this with alarm from Rome's pulpits. It would not be the first time that more nefarious elements have used the Committees of Correspondence as a cat's-paw."



"My assessment also," said Vitelleschi. "However, almost certainly a pure distraction."



"How so?" Barberini asked. It had certainly seemed to him, and to his staff, that an accusation that the pontiff was not in control of Rome would be a serious stick with which to beat on His Holiness. Whatever could be turned to reducing the esteem in which the pope was held would be of use to Borja, if he truly wanted to cripple the papacy for a time, or even pending a new incumbent.



"While attention is elsewhere, more useful measures will be taken. It might also be of use in securing wavering cardinals in a vote in consistory."



"Yet His Holiness may override consistory votes—" Barberini began.



"Not without political costs, my dear nephew," Urban said. "It is already said that I am a nepotist and a bloodsucker. If it were added that I am a tyrant also, I should come to find it difficult to have my orders carried out. I have spent much of my political capital in this past year, I must needs husband what I have most carefully. Father-General," he said, turning to Vitelleschi, "there is a service which I would have the Societas Jesu perform for me."



"Your Holiness," Vitelleschi nodded.



"I need travel arrangements in hand, discreetly as may be, for every sympathetic cardinal within two weeks' travel of Rome, and men on hand to get them here at the highest speed possible. I think I should like to force a vote in consistory and demonstrate I still have a clear majority of opinion in my pocket."



"As you wish, Your Holiness."



"It only remains to determine the issue. And to ensure that we have a majority on the day of the vote. I think we can summon a majority, yes?" Urban sat down on a stone bench.



Vitelleschi pondered a moment. "Even with the Spanish cardinals all come to Rome, Your Holiness, it can be done. Unfortunately, several of your partisans are outside Italy at this time, so it will be a close vote."



"The Borghese," Barberini said.



"Indeed," said Vitelleschi.



"We will have trouble wooing them away from the Spanish party if they have already defected," Urban said. "There is no love lost between Borghese and Barberini. One wonders whether Borja has promised them anything?"